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[BUG] Chapter Skip missing from Emby Theater


ShoutingMan

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ShoutingMan

Next Chapter and Previous Chapter are now missing, or replaced by inappropriate functionality for video playback, in Emby Theater.

 

 

Next/Previous Chapter are two of the four basic transport control tools for video. Skip Forward / Backward enable the user to skim around (and provide a substitute for conventional fast forward and rewind). Next/Previous Chapter enable the user to jump quickly and precisely between major points in a movie (and perhaps in TV shows if so authored). They replicate the behavior found in every DVD, Blu-Ray and UHD player for playback of physical media. These chapter locations come by default in all media I've bought, so I've come to rely on this feature.

 

There's some indication that Next/Previous Chapter were removed from Video playback, and now only work for Audio. That goes against user expectation, is a fundamental feature loss from how Emby Theater worked just recently, and is contrary to Emby's documentation.

 

I trust the normal behavior can be restored expediently.

 

Thanks. :)

 

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Keyboard%20and%20Remote%20Support

  • control-f: next chapter or track
  • control-b: previous chapter or track
Edited by ShoutingMan
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Next Chapter and Previous Chapter are now missing, or replaced by inappropriate functionality for video playback, in Emby Theater.

 

I just wanted to write the same, I discovered this a few days ago with the recent version of Emby Theater (desktop).

 

This does also not work when using a remote control.

I`m using a MCE remote and/or CEC (Pulse Eight adapter), both of them now have non working skip backwards/forward buttons, but this used to work before.

 

Ciao, Alfred

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khodges747

Same here. This has been happening for several days. No "Next Chapter" or "Previous Chapter" function at all, neither with a remote (MCE) or with the OSD and the mouse.

 

Please fix this.

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  • 1 month later...
PurposelyCryptic

This has been driving me crazy since it was implemented, but apparently, it was deliberately changed as a feature rather than a bug - see the following quotes from other threads:
 
https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/56112-xbox-one-emby-theater-issues/&do=findComment&comment=547282

hi Hyanar, the skip button is actually to skip forward and back in the now playing queue.
 
Can we look at some specific examples of videos that are giving you trouble? Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks !

 
 
 
https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/52989-xbox-one-chapter-skip-ff-rewind/&do=findComment&comment=511927

on my android TV there is a menu for selecting the chapter.
 
I'm not sure how to do this on the Xbox one? and I'm using a harmony remote... so hoping there is a way to get:
Skip a chapter forward / back
jump back a little bit
jump forward

 

 

jump back a little bit
jump forward

 
These are already in the video osd but there is no chapter button right now.

 



 
https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/51295-fast-forward-and-rewind-different-than-expected/&do=findComment&comment=493268

hi @@DJ8ones, the buttons in the video player OSD have been changed to previous and next track. The rest we are currently reviewing. thanks.


I too desperately want my good old chapter-skip back, and have never once been in a situation where I needed a dedicated button to jump to the next episode or movie; the only use case I could see would be for music, but without chapter marks (or auto-inserted ones at the 5-min mark by Emby), it should already have jumped to the next entry.

 

Does anyone remember the last version where it worked properly? It seems to have happened a lot longer ago than I thought, going by some of the dates on people's posts

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khodges747

@@PurposelyCryptic

Thanks for the research.

 

@@Luke

IMHO the controls for Emby Theater should mimic, as much as possible, those on a DVD or Bluray player. Since there is no "Next Movie" control on my BR player, I don't think there should be one on Emby Theater. I understand that for music it's helpful to skip to the next track, but for a TV episode or a movie, it is frankly unwanted.

 

This is the feature I miss the most since it was changed a few weeks ago. Please bring back the Next Chapter functionality.

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PurposelyCryptic

@khodges747

 

I did some testing last night, and, strangely, the change doesn't seem like it came from Emby Theater - I reverted my Emby Theater installation back to several older versions, in an effort to find the latest pre-change version, so I could then either run that, or create a fork of the latest version without the change.

 

I ended up trying various versions going all the way back to v2.7.8 (Released in May 2017), but all of them skipped to the next file using any of the remote or keyboard inputs that used to skip to the next chapter.

 

I can think of 4 possible scenarios for what I'm seeing:

  1. I'm an idiot and overlooking something simple that is causing me to misinterpret the situation (Entirely possible - I'm currently home sick with a bad case of the flu and a high fever, so not exactly top shape for anything requiring a clear mind and attention to detail).
  2. There was never a chapter-skip functionality in Emby Theater, and we are all collectively hallucinating/thinking of the chapter skip functionality in Emby for WMC (Pretty unlikely even given how out of it I am; if this is the case I should probably go to the emergency room post-haste).
  3. The change was implemented in Emby Server, which in turn is defining how Emby Theater etc should interpret remote/keyboard inputs, so as to maintain UI consistency across the various Emby viewing platforms (My money is on this one).
  4. A wizard did it.

@Luke,

 

I know you're endlessly busy, but, assuming either 1 or 3 above, do you think you could point us in the rough direction of the origin (in terms of the code/where to look on GitHub, not design philosophy) of the change, as well as a one-or-two-word evaluation of how hard it would be to revert it for personal use (i.e., simple, copy-paste, totally impossible)?

 

If the change is actually in Emby Theater and I just missed it due to stupidity, would it be possible to reintegrate the chapter-skip functionality and simply bind it to a different input, assuming complete reversion would run counter to your design ideals (like how in Emby for WMC, it is mapped to Page-Up/Page-Down)? If it is in Emby Server, I could see it being more complicated, but perhaps an option for some obscure keyboard-combination?

 

 

All that aside but somewhat related, I feel like a lot of effort in Emby development these past few years has gone into simplifying the user experience to appeal to a broader base (limiting the complexity/variety of certain options, removing controls only a limited number would use, less customizability) - any chance there will ever be something like an 'Advanced Mode' toggle, so that, while still hidden away from those who don't need them, more complex options would still be available? Just been on my mind for a long time. Thanks for your time!

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Guest asrequested

Changes with the UI are global and aren't version specific. Versioning is for major changes such as the player.

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PurposelyCryptic

Changes with the UI are global and aren't version specific. Versioning is for major changes such as the player.

 

No offense intended, but I'm not entirely sure I see what you are trying to say. What I was testing for was when the change was introduced into Emby Theater, so that I could then either run a version (whether a numbered release or compiled from code just prior to the change) in which the change was not yet implemented, or use the relevant section of pre-change code as a basis for a fork in which the change was reverted. Wiping Emby Theater and then progressively going back and testing numbered releases seemed like the best way to narrow it down (If version x.1 had working chapter-skip and version x.2 did not, the change would be somewhere between the two).

 

Since the change has only fairly recently been noticed by Emby Theater users, I expected the it to have been introduced sometime this year, in which case code from before then (such as present in an earlier release) should have had a working chapter-skip functionality.

 

Contrary to said expectations, every version I tested going back through last May exhibited the same behavior, i.e., the chapter-skip having been replaced with playlist-entry-skip.I admittedly only spent an hour or so looking over the individual commits,but if the change was in the Emby Theater code, and thus introduced over 9 months ago, one would expect that people would have brought up the issue at the time, rather than them suddenly noticing the change only in the past several weeks.

 

Curiously enough, to further attempt to locate the change, I am now running an old version of Emby Server I pulled from backup in addition to the old version of Emby Theater, and somehow still don't have working chapter-skip... I'm really curious as to where exactly in the code (and in the code for what) this function is implemented in, because I can't think of anything else to roll back.

 

There has to be something very obvious I'm missing, but I sadly have no clue as to what. :(

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FrostByte

I think it has been a little longer than a few weeks since this change occurred.  There are several threads in here going back to at least last Sept where Luke says the buttons where changed to next episode/track.

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Guest asrequested

What I'm saying is that even if you download the first version, that feature is not tied to the version. The way things like that are applied is in general. Changes like that are applied without releasing a new version. It will be applied to every version.

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PurposelyCryptic

I think it has been a little longer than a few weeks since this change occurred.  There are several threads in here going back to at least last Sept where Luke says the buttons where changed to next episode/track.

That's part of what has me so confused - there are at least a handful of people for whom this change didn't seem to appear until fairly recently in this thread, and while I don't remember exactly when it happened, I distinctly remember using the chapter-skip functionality in Emby Theater up until earlier this year.

 

A lot of the earlier posts I saw mentioning the same issue were on platforms like Xbox One, Android, etc., which is what made me consider the possibility of responses to specific inputs being coded into Emby Server, but the playback platforms only gradually having been converted to use that system over time (if that makes any sense).

 

Right now, I've switched to a combination of almost a year-old versions of Emby Server and Theater, but somehow still don't have chapter-skipping, though, which just makes no sense to me, so all I can think of is that I'm looking at everything completely wrong, and that the answer lies somewhere completely different.

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PurposelyCryptic

What I'm saying is that even if you download the first version, that feature is not tied to the version. The way things like that are applied is in general. Changes like that are applied without releasing a new version. It will be applied to every version.

 

...are you sure we're talking about the same thing? The entire reason systems like GitHub exist is so that you have a clear history of every revision made, and can go back and examine (and in this case, use) the code from every stage of development - if you universally modified every commit to include new code, that would entirely defeat the system's purpose.

 

Even if you update various dependencies later on, as long as you do a complete build based on a specific commit stage, it will be built with the version of those dependencies referenced by it, and be identical to one built immediately after the commit - if it didn't work like that, the build would more than likely fail.

 

I'm also not sure what you mean by "that feature is not tied to the version"; any feature's presence or absence in a build is determined by whether that feature has been coded into that particular revision - if the code implementing that feature has yet to be written at a particular point in development, compiling the code from that point in time will result in a version without that feature. 

 

I've gone back many times over the years when an update to Emby broke a feature I needed or was no longer compatible with a particular plugin, and either grabbed the previous release, or did a custom build based off of an intermediary commit, and I've never encountered a feature being retroactively written over the older code so that the original code was no longer accessible - I'm not even sure how you would go about doing that, since modifying the older code would simply result in another commit, rather than overwriting the old one. Being able to do so would go against the core purpose of keeping a repository in the first place.

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Guest asrequested

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm a staunch Theater guy. This has been talked about many times. They have designed the system so that updates like that can be easily applied. Have you noticed how often the tv guide has be changed? It's so Luke can quickly apply changes without having a major release.

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PurposelyCryptic

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm a staunch Theater guy. This has been talked about many times. They have designed the system so that updates like that can be easily applied. Have you noticed how often the tv guide has be changed? It's so Luke can quickly apply changes without having a major release.

Ok, we are definitely talking about completely different things - when I say version, I'm talking about a specific commit stage of the code-base on GitHub in the Theater and Electron Theater repos, not a release on Emby's download page.

 

Emby Theater has an auto-update function that downloads the latest numbered release Luke puts out on GitHub in the background - it compares the current version installed, and if the latest in the repository is greater, it downloads it in a zip file and overwrites the current files in the directory. So any version you download will automatically overwrite itself with the latest one, if you let it (and it's pretty damn tenacious about it too). But every code revision ever made to Emby Theater is still part of the git repository, and easily accessible from there.

 

I specifically disabled the parts that auto-update Emby Theater so that I could run older revisions of the code in order to see at what point the chapter-skip functionality got replaced, so I could build a version without the change, only I've had no luck finding it somehow.

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Jdiesel

Is it a difference in how the keys are mapped? In WMC the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-B/Ctrl-F. With mpv it is PGDWN/PGUP. Does PGDWN/PGUP work in Emby Theatre? How about standalone mpv?

Edited by Jdiesel
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Guest asrequested

Ok, we are definitely talking about completely different things - when I say version, I'm talking about a specific commit stage of the code-base on GitHub in the Theater and Electron Theater repos, not a release on Emby's download page.

 

Emby Theater has an auto-update function that downloads the latest numbered release Luke puts out on GitHub in the background - it compares the current version installed, and if the latest in the repository is greater, it downloads it in a zip file and overwrites the current files in the directory. So any version you download will automatically overwrite itself with the latest one, if you let it (and it's pretty damn tenacious about it too). But every code revision ever made to Emby Theater is still part of the git repository, and easily accessible from there.

 

I specifically disabled the parts that auto-update Emby Theater so that I could run older revisions of the code in order to see at what point the chapter-skip functionality got replaced, so I could build a version without the change, only I've had no luck finding it somehow.

We are talking about the exact same thing. Updates like this don't get put up on GitHub. That's why you can't find it. It's not there to be found. But you don't seem to want to believe me, for whatever reason.

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PurposelyCryptic

We are talking about the exact same thing. Updates like this don't get put up on GitHub. That's why you can't find it. It's not there to be found. But you don't seem to want to believe me, for whatever reason.

 

Look, its late, I'm sick, and definitely don't feel like arguing with you. But GitHub isn't a file-host that specific updates get uploaded to, it's the git (a version control system platform) host the emby devs use for Emby Server, Emby Theater, etc. It's a digital collaborative platform that hosts their code repositories, in other word all the code written for the project and a complete version history documenting all the changes made - nothing gets "put up" on GitHub in the traditional sense, whenever Luke et al edit any of the raw code for Emby Theater, Emby Server, etc, and they are finished with a particular part, they "commit" it, and it gets added to the list of changes on GitHub, allowing any other developer working on it to sync with it, updating their local repository and showing exactly what was changed.

 

All of the code, and all the changes are hosted there, and that is the reason it works - if any changes weren't hosted there, it would make the entire system meaningless. 

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PurposelyCryptic

Is it a difference in how the keys are mapped? In WMC the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-B/Ctrl-F. With mpv it is PGDWN/PGUP. Does PGDWN/PGUP work in Emby Theatre? How about standalone mpv?

 

As far as I can tell, Emby Theater uses its own key-mapping instead of mpv's; most of the keyboard commands from stand-alone mpv don't do anything in ET, including Page-Up/Down for chapter skipping.

 

According to the Emby wiki, the keyboard shortcut is meant to be

  • control-f: next chapter or track
  • control-b: previous chapter or track

but atm, both only apply to tracks, ignoring chapters.

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Jdiesel

Well I agree that skipping chapters should be included. The number of times I wanted to skip to the next video in a playlist is zero. Chapter skipping on the other hand is very useful.

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Guest asrequested

Look, its late, I'm sick, and definitely don't feel like arguing with you. But GitHub isn't a file-host that specific updates get uploaded to, it's the git (a version control system platform) host the emby devs use for Emby Server, Emby Theater, etc. It's a digital collaborative platform that hosts their code repositories, in other word all the code written for the project and a complete version history documenting all the changes made - nothing gets "put up" on GitHub in the traditional sense, whenever Luke et al edit any of the raw code for Emby Theater, Emby Server, etc, and they are finished with a particular part, they "commit" it, and it gets added to the list of changes on GitHub, allowing any other developer working on it to sync with it, updating their local repository and showing exactly what was changed.

 

All of the code, and all the changes are hosted there, and that is the reason it works - if any changes weren't hosted there, it would make the entire system meaningless. 

 

I'm familiar with it

 

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/emby-theater-windows/releases

 

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/compare/v0.28.2...master

Edited by Doofus
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FrostByte

Well I agree that skipping chapters should be included. The number of times I wanted to skip to the next video in a playlist is zero. Chapter skipping on the other hand is very useful.

 

Agree, I use that button for two things - for skipping chapters in a movie and skipping to the next song in a music playlist.  If I feel like watching another video I'll just start it.

Edited by FrostByte
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ShoutingMan

Lets not argue about GitHub, and instead focus energies on advocating for the return of Chapter Skip functionality :)

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ShoutingMan

This has been driving me crazy since it was implemented, but apparently, it was deliberately changed as a feature rather than a bug - see the following quotes from other threads:

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/56112-xbox-one-emby-theater-issues/&do=findComment&comment=547282

 

 

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/52989-xbox-one-chapter-skip-ff-rewind/&do=findComment&comment=511927

 

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/51295-fast-forward-and-rewind-different-than-expected/&do=findComment&comment=493268

 

I too desperately want my good old chapter-skip back, and have never once been in a situation where I needed a dedicated button to jump to the next episode or movie; the only use case I could see would be for music, but without chapter marks (or auto-inserted ones at the 5-min mark by Emby), it should already have jumped to the next entry.

 

Does anyone remember the last version where it worked properly? It seems to have happened a lot longer ago than I thought, going by some of the dates on people's posts

I’d seen that thread previously, after reporting this bug. The rationale for changing the functionality makes no sense. It’s coming from the seeming perspective of someone who only listens to music and never watches movies. It makes zero sense for a movie player, defying 20 years of video transport control conventions.

 

Chapter Skip worked last Fall. I had my remote control programmed for it. I was using the feature then.

 

Then it vanished.

 

I especially miss it when watching Extras. They don’t have a “Resume” feature. I often can’t watch a full 90 min Making Off featurette. Chapter Skip makes it easy to jump back to where I was. Using a 15-second Skip forward is an exercise in tedium trying to advance hundreds of remote-control button presses to get forward an hour to where I left off.

 

It’s also a great feature for doing demos, or just watching favorite scenes in movies. Instead of jumping forward by numerous teeny increments, easily jump a few chapter chapters to marvel at “Shiny” in “Moana”.

 

Fundamentally, I wish Emby wouldn’t break existing features when doing updates. We’ve lost a Chapter Skip and audio track labels, inexplicably, for months. Hoping some of Emby’s key selling points (for me) come back.

 

When they do, I’ll probably turn off auto updates to prevent the random breaking of my setup afterwards.

Edited by ShoutingMan
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